“...I have an odd feeling that whatever we do in environments we share with children, we ought to do because they seem like the most sensible, interesting, and humane things to do in the here and now, without hoping or expecting too much of this or that will cause the children to grow up to be this or that kind of person, or do this or that or the other thing.”—John Holt

By stories Frank Lord does not mean fiction. He means real, true-life stories, sometimes only a few sentences long, but that have relevance to a given situation. These stories can be about comfort, empathy, achievement, failure, industriousness, illness, good health; any topic, really, that allows us to reveal our past to our children in a nurturing manner.

Too often parents and teachers want to let children know they approve of what the child is doing, and by doing so they ruin the “learning moment” for the child. Keeping our egos out of our children’s learning is hard to do, but worth doing, as it can help children develop a stronger sense of self, as these letters show.

This is an eternal question for parents, but for many in the unschooling and alternative school communities it can be a very divisive topic. Madeline Murphy writes, “We have found that there is an ebb and flow to the amount of structure and to the amount of direction we provide in our children’s learning, but we are always involved.”